Mullivaikaal today is a picture perfect beach with a small fishing community. Boats line the seafront, stuffed with freshly caught fish, sting rays and even tiny sharks. It is hard to imagine that this beach was soaked in the blood of thousands of Tamils in 2009, as the Sri Lankan military indiscriminately shelled the last strip of territory controlled by the outlawed Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE). The fishermen say they were allowed to return here in 2012, and the physical signs of massacre have mostly been erased now, apart from a few sand bags in a crater behind the beach. But the pain is still etched onto the memories of the survivors, and many live in ramshackle shelters struggling to make a living.

If Sri Lanka’s new president, Sirisena, can reconcile the grievances of the country’s Tamil minority, then Mullivaikaal will be a litmus test. Many of the families here are headed by widows, who lost their husbands in the final months of the war. When I asked a group of them if the new president has made any improvements to their lives, the response was a resounding no. One lady, Uma*, shrugged, held out empty hands and said Sirisena has done “nothing”. The women live in houses built by an Indian government aid scheme. For many, doors are an unaffordable extra in this scheme. Soldiers roam freely around the neighbourhood on tractors and in trucks. Plain clothed policemen turn up to women’s meetings. The beach, for all its beauty, has a very spooky atmosphere.

The Sri Lankan government has made sure that army and navy camps saturate this former rebel stronghold. Garish war victory statues blot the roadside landscape. Signs next to blown up water towers remind the Tamils to “SAY NO TO DESTRUCTION EVER AGAIN”. Driving along the highway, military bases appear every ten minutes, with grand entrances and plush buildings inside. Five-star hotels and key tourist attractions can be found inside some of these bases. Many were built on stolen land, and the displaced widows are told to register their family details with the army to have any chance of getting it back, a crude piece of bureaucratic intimidation that keeps them landless. The women say life here was better under the rebels, but that way of life has now been destroyed.

Remembering the dead

May 18 is the sixth anniversary of this destruction. All around the world on this day since 2009, Tamil people have gathered in huge numbers to remember their dead. Inside Sri Lanka, the mourning has had to happen in secret. The first year after the war ended, the Tamil Civil Society Forum tried to hold a commemoration service with priests, but hundreds of soldiers arrived outside. The army said to the organisers “If you do it I will suspect you as an LTTE sympathiser”. I.D. cards were taken from everyone and police went to priests’ homes at night and threatened to shoot them. But with a new president in place, activists are testing the waters of the so-called new democracy, and seeing what they can get away with.

“This year the commemorations will happen in public”, Father Elil Rajendram assured me. But as he is choosing a location for the memorial service in Mullivaikaal, a mysterious motorbike pulls up behind us, with the riders dressed in Denis the Menace striped polo shirts. These are intelligence officers, Father Elil explains, who are spying on the priest’s preparation. Despite the intimidation, local people still seem determined to attend. Uma says she is not scared to go, as her son was killed at the end of the war. Preparations are happening across Tamil towns and villages. As I arrive in Jaffna to meet another organiser, news comes through that his event has been banned by the police, to prevent ‘a breach of the peace’. The authorities say rival Tamil political groups could clash – a far-fetched scenario. Police seem unwilling to facilitate free assembly, instead inventing spurious reasons to ban or restrict public events.

The Tamil National People’s Front (TNPF), an opposition political party, circumvent the ban by switching locations at the last minute, and gather on a remote beach in Maruthankerni under a makeshift shelter. Buses venture for miles down a pot-holed road, and before long over a hundred people have arrived. Red and yellow bunting (Tamil national colours) is put up everywhere, and lanterns are lit. The commemoration goes ahead, but the organisers say Sri Lankan military intelligence are photographing everyone there. Father Elil’s multi-faith commemoration service in Mullivaikaal also went ahead, albeit under heavy surveillance. Participants started photographing the intelligence officers, perhaps a sign that the fear barrier is beginning to waiver. Hundreds of students and staff gathered at Jaffna university, and commemorations happened in all corners of the Tamil parts of Sri Lanka. A brave performance, but a sinister scene for a so-called democracy.

Tamil National Alliance vs Tamil National People’s Front

The Tamil National Alliance (TNA) is the traditional choice for Tamil nationalist voters, winning almost all the seats in former rebel-held areas. But many people feel that the TNA is not challenging the new president’s spluttering reforms enough. Gajendrakumar Ponnambalam, founder of the rival TNPF, says the TNA leadership gave Sirisena their “unconditional support” when he won the presidency, putting Tamils in a weak bargaining position. Ponnambalam was an MP for the TNA until the war ended, when he split from the party over fears that they were becoming compromised. Parliamentary elections are due any time in Sri Lanka, and the TNPF stands a chance of gaining at least one seat if it can reach out to Tamils who are also unimpressed by the TNA’s recent performance. But Ponnambalam says that going against the TNA with its money, media influence and historic association with the Tamil Tigers will be tough.

Ponnambalam says that even if he does not return to parliament this time, he is more interested in “building power outside the ballot box”, by which he means “mass peaceful mobilisations that could force the Sri Lankan state to make some real concessions to the Tamils”. In three decades of armed struggle, the closest parallel to Ponnambalam’s current thinking was the Pongu Thamil (Tamil Upsurge) events, which mobilised over a hundred thousand people to gather in support of Tamil self-determination year after year in towns across the region. Jay*, who was instrumental in starting those events, told me how they sent ‘animators’ to villages and organised small theatre performances, where local people gained confidence to share their stories, before coming together en masse at the Pongu Thamil gatherings. But he thinks that it could take 5 or 10 years for Tamil people to regain their confidence for that scale of mobilisation.

Protesting sexual violence or threatening national security?

And yet spontaneous protests are sweeping the Tamil regions, after an 18-year-old school girl Sivaloganathan Vithiya was brutally raped and murdered on Pungudutivu island off Jaffna on 14 May. The police allegedly told the girl’s family when they reported her missing that she had probably eloped with her boyfriend. Sexual violence in Sri Lanka has become synonymous with the security forces, but the prime suspects in this murder are Tamil civilians. A Tamil doctor told me that this case was a reflection of a wider breakdown of society under the pressure of a counter-insurgency strategy, where police and soldiers are allegedly pushing drugs and alcohol onto the youth.

Angry school kids have taken to the streets in large numbers and whole towns hundreds of miles away from Jaffna have shut down in hartal strikes. The protests reflect a widespread frustration at the vulnerability of Tamil women, and even a certain nostalgia for times when women could walk the streets safely at night in rebel held areas. But whether the protests will grow into more a sustained movement, like in India after the 2012 Delhi bus gang rape, remains to be seen. Already, hardline Sri Lankan nationalist politicians are branding the protesters as a new wave of Tamil Tiger militants, and calling for a harsh crackdown. Even demonstrations against sexual violence are seen as a threat to national security. The president has promised to create a ‘national security plan’ to prevent a ‘terrorist resurgence‘. On May 20, crowds in Jaffna were met with teargas and 127 people were arrested, as riot police, Special Task Force anti-terrorist commandos and soldiers came out on the streets.

Despite the militarised law and order situation, the UK is still training Sri Lanka’s police, even after the contract expired in March 2015. Staff from the Scottish Police College are currently in Sri Lanka on a three week visit. Their taxpayer-funded ‘aid’ work is apparently focusing on ‘community policing, ethical leadership and organisational management’. Their approach seems at odds with a police force dressed in khaki uniforms, some carrying kalashnikovs, and where the police stations in Tamil towns look more like garrisons. A Tamil Civil Society Forum member told me that “For us Tamils, police and army are in the same category. They both all speak Sinhalese [the language of the majority population]. They were the ones who started the harassment and beatings in our youth. We have not seen any improvement. When the Sinhalese police come to Tamil areas they are different people.”

‘War hero’ day

The fear of a Tamil uprising is something that resonates powerfully among Sri Lanka’s majority Sinhalese Buddhist community and generates strong support for the armed forces. The last president, Rajapaksa, embodied this anti-Tamil sentiment as he vanquished the Tigers and pushed Sinhalese settlers onto Tamil land. Although his personal corruption may have cost him the presidency, he still haunts the political landscape. The new president promised to hold a more respectful Remembrance Day, instead of Rajapaksa’s triumphalist annual War Heroes parades, on May 19. But in the end the difference was mere semantics, as the event looked the same as previous years. “Rajapaksa celebrated May 19 as ‘war victory’ day. These new people have to have an international image to say they are not Rajapaksas, that they are different and commemorate all the minorities,” said Kusal Perera, a Sinhalese journalist, “So what they did was they branded this ‘war victory day’ with a different label, to say ‘war heroes remembrance day’. But the celebrations were exactly what Rajapaksa did. Huge military parades. This is a way of keeping the Sinhala supremacist ideology going for decades to come. All these things are in the package with a different brand name called ‘remembrance day’. But if you go to the ministry of defence website the lingo is different and its still called ‘war hero’ day. It’s like selling the local Arrack with a black label.”

Even in Colombo, Sri Lanka’s capital, journalists who welcomed the new president are sceptical about what change can happen for the Tamils. Lasantha Ruhunage, president of Sri Lanka’s Working Journalist Association, said that the press face less threats now than under the previous administration, but the new president has refused to set up a commission to investigate cases of journalist who disappeared. Many more had to flee the country and still cannot return. Another reporter told me as we walked through two sets of heavy steel gates that his office was bombed twice during the last ten years, by groups linked to the government. A new Right to Information law is being drafted, which could act as a check on corruption, but Ruhunage is concerned that it includes a national security exemption with no definition of what is ‘national security’.

Scraps of land

Sri Lankan politicians have to court Sinhala nationalism and Buddhist assertiveness to stay in power. Even small scale returns of Tamil land are seen as a betrayal. If President Sirisena gives the Tamils too much before the parliamentary election, then Rajapaksa could make a come back at the polls, observers warn. But a member of the Tamil Civil Society Forum said that “If Sirisena does not even try to explain to the Sinhalese electorate why Tamils deserve their land, then he will not have a mandate to address it when he stays in power, and the Tamils will almost certainly get nothing.”

One example is the people of Sampur, who fled their land in 2006 when the Sri Lankan military attacked. Survivors say that the shelling killed 70 residents before they could escape on boats. Since then the thousand or so families have been displaced multiple times, before returning to temporary camps just across the road from Sampur in 2009. In that time, their homes had been bulldozed and the land fenced off by the Navy. Part of it was sold to foreign investors in a 4 billion USD deal to build a heavy industrial plant. But the people of Sampur refused to go away, and in a landmark case for Tamil land rights they finally won some of their land back on 20 May 2015. So far, only about a fifth of the families had got their land back and the government was yet to give any funds to rebuild the homes that it had demolished. When I visited Sampur the following day, the residents were rushing around trying to find what was left of their homes. One family only had a handful of bricks. Drinking wells had fallen into disrepair, mango and coconut trees had lost out to thorny ‘jungle’ trees. Bonfires were being lit everywhere as people hacked down the bushes and franticly tried to clear the land. The men wanted to camp there tonight, to stop the navy coming back and stealing the land again. But it was too dangerous for the women to sleep there too, they said, glancing nervously at the Navy base 100 metres down the road.

If this is Sri Lanka’s ‘new democracy’, then the Tamils are still living in the shadow of the military.

Northern Province Chief Minister (CM) C.V. Wigneswaran and Jaffna Security Forces Commander (SFC) Major General Udaya Perera have made contradictory statements, on the security situation in the North, to the Hindu.

While Wigneswaran has said that the story, about the LTTE regrouping had been floated in order to justify the heavy military presence in the North, Maj. Gen. Perera says that the present stringent security measures have been aimed at preventing a possible re-emergence of the group in the island.

Maj. Gen. Perera said, “We hear that sections of the Diaspora are funding some of those elements here.” The ‘precaution,’ he said, was also necessary to nab a suspect, who opened fire on a policeman in Kilinochchi.
The army has maintained that the suspect, Gopi, and an associate, Appan, had links with sections of the Tamil Diaspora reportedly working to revive the LTTE. “There is no popular support for such regrouping, but such forces may exploit vulnerable communities in the North. We will not allow that,” Maj. Gen. Perera told The Hindu.

Wigneswaran observing that the story about the LTTE re-emerging was ‘very weak’, said many unanswered questions remained about the suspect Gopi, the policeman said to have been injured when he reportedly opened fire, and the delay in nabbing him.

“We have been repeatedly asking the government to confine the military in the North to the barracks, but the government does not want to de-militarise the North. This story is being floated only to justify the military presence in the North,” Wigneswaran said.
(AP)

Army Commander, Lieutenant General Daya Ratnayake, has assured that the LTTE would not be allowed to regroup and the Security Forces would do its best to safeguard national security.

The Army Chief expressed concern over the present security situation in the North when he toured Kilinochchi on Monday where he took part in several welfare activities.

The Army Chief in his address further said the Security Forces have made immense sacrifice to establish peace in the North and East and in the country at large. However, certain external forces are trying to disrupt the peace by reviving the LTTE, he added.

“The recent security measures taken in the North are aimed at preventing any form of LTTE activities in the North and not to create any problems to the civilians. Therefore, the civilians should cooperate with the Security Forces and the police in preventing any form of subversive activities in the North,” the Army Commander said.
In his address to nearly 350 officers serving in the Kilinochchi District, he explained the attempts made by disruptive elements abroad to disrupt the peace in the country by creating various forms of obstacles in the international arena.
Lieutenant General Ratnayake also explained the livelihood and development programmes supported by the Army in the North.

The Army Commander handed over authorized documents to the owners of the private lands released by the Army in Kilinochchi. A significant number of civilians regained their lands, which were in the possession of the Army.
Meanwhile, the search operations have also been launched in the Eastern Province to nab the LTTE suspects wanted in connection with the shooting incident at Tharmapuram, Kilinochchi, two weeks ago and posters have come up in various places in the East giving the details of the suspects.
(AP)

Sri Lanka wishes to exercise its right of reply on statements made regarding the arrest and detention of Ms. Balendran Jeyakumari, and the detention of Mr. Ruki Fernando and Father Praveen.

Investigations revealed that K.P. Selvanayagam a.k.a. Gobi who had been overseas and returned to Sri Lanka was actively involved in reviving the LTTE through regrouping LTTE cadres and recruiting unemployed local youth with the intention of using them for acts of terrorism.
The intention of these LTTE operatives headed by Gobi had been to recover arms cachés hidden by the LTTE prior to their defeat.
The key operative directing the operations, Gobi, had been evading arrest. Following further investigations, the Terrorist Investigations Division (TID) had recovered an arms caché including mortar and RPG type live ammunition, 3 hand grenades, 2.5 kg claymore bomb and ammunition for T-56 weapons.
Pursuant to this recovery, and a lead obtained on the whereabouts of Gobi, a team of Police Officers proceeded to the residence of Balendran Jeyakumari in Killinochchi. During the search operation Gobi had fired at the Police, injuring a sub-Inspector and escaped.
At this residence, the landlady Balendran Jeyakumari and her 13 year old daughter Vibooshika were present. Since suspect Gobi while being armed escaped, a search was carried out on the said residence. A Menelab F-3 type mine detector was recovered. Therefore, Ms. Jeyakumari was placed under arrest on suspicion of aiding and abetting Gobi in his activities.
As Balendran Jeyakumari had been unable to provide an appropriate caregiver/relative to keep her 13 year old daughter, she was taken along with the mother and produced before the Killinochchi Magistrate. Based on the Magistrate’s order, Vibooshika has been placed under the care of Probation and Child Care Services.
The aforementioned arrest was made under the Prevention of Terrorism Act (PTA). The ICRC has access to all detainees being held at Boossa.
Therefore, it is regrettable that an elected member of the Northern Provincial Council, Ms. Ananthi Sasitharan, has chosen to misrepresent this case in this august body and depict it as an arrest made of a child who had participated in protests. It is also regrettable that Ms. Sasitharan, despite being a member of a provincial administration, has chosen to make statements in the Council using time allocated to two NGOs. We also note that Ms. Sasitharan, in referring in her statements to the Council to “Tamil Eelam”, has failed to adhere to the agreed language of the United Nations, and is in violation of the Constitution she has pledged to uphold as a Provincial Councilor.

The detention on 16th March of Mr. Ruki Fernando and Father Praveen under the PTA were in connection with the aforesaid investigation into attempts to revive the LTTE by operatives, including the recovery of the arms caché at Vishwamadu and the shooting incident in Dharmapuram involving Gobi. Investigations have revealed that Mr. Fernando and Father Praveen had been in Killinochchi engaging with persons connected to Gobi. Their questioning is continuing at present to ascertain the whereabouts of Gobi and other related operatives.

The above actions taken by the Law Enforcement Authorities of Sri Lanka are well within the existing legal framework and following due process.

This development also underscores the need to be vigilant on the activities of the remnants of the terrorist group, considering its bearing on national security.

Leader of the House and Irrigation and Water Resources Management Minister Nimal Siripala de Silva yesterday said that the resolution adopted by Parliament to set up a Special Commission to Investigate human rights violations committed by the LTTE, arising from the adjournment motion moved by UPFA MP A.H.M. Azwer will be submitted to President Mahinda Rajapaksa on his return to the country from a visit to Myanmar.

He made these observations in response to an adjournment motion moved by UPFA MP A.H.M. Azwer.

A.H.M. Azwer (UPFA): I suggest that a Special Commission should be set up to investigate human rights violations committed by the LTTE against Sinhalese, Tamils and Muslims through their brutal killings. The LTTE killed Sinhalese, Muslims and Tamils and chased the Sinhala and Muslim people from the North.